


Out There on the Crossroads

by HyperLittleNori (Shiguresan)



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, Chris Argent and Derek are Hunting Partners, Demon Hunter Chris Argent, Demon Hunter Derek Hale, Demon Stiles Stilinski, Hurt/Comfort, Inspired by Supernatural (TV), Kissing, M/M, Powerful Stiles Stilinski, Prompt Fic, Werewolf Derek Hale, sterek, wish fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-15
Updated: 2019-09-15
Packaged: 2020-10-19 10:00:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20655356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shiguresan/pseuds/HyperLittleNori
Summary: The grey glow of early morning trickled through the thin curtains. Derek froze at the sight of the man sitting upright on the bed. His long fingers were wrapped around his drawn up knees, chin resting against his knuckles as he watched Derek and Chris both in the quiet dimness. His heartbeat thudded just a fraction faster than a human’s and when Derek slowly rose to his feet, the diminutive light caught in the young man’s eyes like a cat’s in the darkness, before flickering away like a trick of the light.He of all people knew that monsters weren’t always the ones that looked monstrous, but he still struggled to reconcile the quiet creature before him with the carnage out on the crossroads.





	Out There on the Crossroads

**Author's Note:**

> So as some of you know, I've been writing some wishfics/prompt fics for people over on one of the sterek groups before I start posting the two longer Sterek fics I've got in the works, just to give me a little breather. 
> 
> I actually combined two people’s wishes for this fic since they both just went together so well. So this story is for Dean K. who wanted a ‘powerful Stiles’ and Ghostinthe Bau who wanted demon Stiles and expressed a ‘love Supernatural’. I think this story ran away with me and I sort of took liberties with your requests. Ghost’s line ‘what if Stiles was the demon?’ and Dean’s ‘powerful Stiles’ just combined in this maelstrom in my head and this story was born. 
> 
> I was so excited to write this one, I had all these ideas and such inspiration but I suffered a lot with anxiety over it and went back and changed it so many times. At one point, I deleted about 6000 words of it and rewrote them because it didn't feel right and now I'm a little worried it's not as good as I'd imagined in my head. It was also meant to be a ficlet and it grew into a little beast. But I did get truly involved in the feels of writing this so, Dean, Ghost, I hope you both love it anyway as I enjoyed every minute of writing it for you :)

The bar was an utter dive; Derek would’ve been able to tell that even if his senses hadn’t been able to pick up on the smell of unwashed patrons, smoke, alcohol and who knew what else. He scanned the room as he walked in, his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket. It was the kind of place where no one really looked at who walked in the door, which helped with keeping a low profile.

He slid onto the least soiled bar stool and looked casually along the length of the bar, taking in each of the patrons there, engrossed in their own inebriated conversations.

It was loud and raucous. This place had a type, customers as unclean and crooked as the establishment itself. Not one of the nicer bars Derek had frequented over the years, and he’d visited _many _bars. In his line of work, that’s where the best informants tended to frequent.

“What can I getcha?” The bartender asked as he settled in his seat.

Derek surveyed him carefully, measuring him. “Whatever has the biggest kick,” he said evenly, handing over a little fold of bills, at least if it had a high alcohol content he might get a brief buzz. He let the bartender see the larger roll of bills and was obvious in his hesitation to put it away. “Maybe you could help me? I heard there’ve been some gruesome deaths around here recently. Last guy was one of your regulars–”

“Get out,” the man said firmly.

Derek frowned, tried not to tense as some of the nearest patrons went quiet. “Look, there’s money in it if you can help me out. I need–”

“I don’t serve your kind,” the bartender sneered.

Derek’s lips parted around a perfectly rehearsed statement of disbelief, but then he caught the reflection of the security camera under the bar in the dirty glass wall behind it. Even through the grime he could make out his own face and the way his eyes flared unnaturally with the camera.

He sat up straighter in the stool.

“Is there a problem here, Derek?” A warm hand rested on Derek’s shoulder as Chris pulled himself casually onto the stool next to him.

Exhaling through his nostrils with frustration, Derek didn’t look away from the bigoted asshole behind the bar. He just breathed.

“Get my friend a drink, would you?” Chris asked amicably.

The bartender blinked. “You can’t be serious, you’re with him? Aren’t you an Argent?”

It wasn’t the first time Chris’s family name had preceded him. Chris gave a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Sure am. Now how about that drink? I’ll have whatever he’s having and if you could help us with some information that’d be much appreciated.”

Looking between them, the bartender seemed to be struggling to make sense of it all. “He’s a fucking werewolf.”

It wasn’t unusual to come across people ‘in the know’ in these kinds of establishments, out in sleepy towns built around myth and legend. It also wasn’t unusual that those people felt the way this guy did about werewolves, for that matter.

A tendon in Chris’s neck twitched at the language, it was always one of his pet peeves. His steady smile didn’t slip though. “He’s my hunting buddy, as it happens. The fact that you recognise him makes things simpler, though. I won’t have to speak in code. So how about you serve us the strongest drinks you have, then tell us everything about the night one of your regulars was found dead out on the crossroads under potentially supernatural circumstances?”

It was a statement, not a question. Chris had this manner that people didn’t generally argue with, a presence that Derek envied. It was what made them a good team.

The bartender went ashen at his words, every muscle in his body tightening as he stared at them as if he’d seen a ghost. Derek heard him swallow, watched his mouth twitch as if Chris’s words were rolling around and around in his head aimlessly.

“He ran the big fuel trucks in and out of town,” he managed eventually, with the air of a man choosing his words very carefully.

Derek sat up a little straighter. “Yeah? And did he fill up his own ‘tank’ here before he headed out on his next shift?” he asked sharply. Marin, Chris’s contact at the FBI had asked them to take a look into this nightmare of a case that had crossed her path, but she’d said there had been something no one could explain scrambling the toxicology reports and every other test they tried to run on the guy’s blood. It was like something had altered its contents beyond any scientific recognition. If the guy had been drunk, it would explain maybe why he’d pulled over in the first place, but very little else.

The bartender bristled at the accusation in Derek’s tone. “Ain’t none of my business what he does when he leaves, s’long as he pays up and behaves himself on premises.”

Chris leaned in then, voice dark even as his smile softened into one of gentleness. “See, the problem is, me and a lot of other people think it _is _your business if you serve excess alcohol to a man you know is driving, much less a man driving a heavy goods vehicle with _flammable _contents.”

Stepping back, the man swallowed again, sweat beading across his brow. “Look. I don’t want no trouble. Weylan, he was a bruiser of a guy but he kept to himself. He did his job, a job not many people would do ‘round these parts. He knew the roads, knew the rules, knew better than to stop on the crossroads. I didn’t know the guy except to serve him liquor but I know he wouldn’t have stopped there unless he had good reason.”

Sharing a look, Chris and Derek studied each other for a moment, before Derek gave a small duck of his head, taking up the mostly clean glass the bartender had hastily served him and swigging the lot back in one swallow. It burned, not the way it might for a human but it was potent enough to give him a little tingle, enough to warm his bones on the cold night.

It was textbook, really. A small town built around a rest-stop and mining facility that had long gone bust, struggling to survive on the business the diminutive through-traffic brought them. A crossroads on the outskirts surrounded by nothing but twisted trees that thickened into the woodland beyond. Disappearances over the years discounted as animal attacks or runaways. No wonder Marin had asked them to take a look.

“So how about you tell me everything you know about the crossroads out of town then?” Chris suggested smoothly as he reached for his own drink.

*

As Chris guided the _Camaro _to a stop in the rundown truck-stop just alongside the crossroads, Derek sighed. Tipping his head back against the headrest, he looked out the window to the deserted crossroads where the body had been found. The tanker was still parked in the deserted stop, crime scene tape all around it but other than that there was no sign of civilisation or life at all. It was like something out of a dystopian universe.

He turned to look at Chris with a weary look that clearly said _‘typical_’ and Chris gave him a grin. “You’re the one with the super senses,” he teased and Derek scowled, pushing the car door open.

The night carried a heavy dankness to it, the way it always did after it’d rained all day. The sky was clear, but the ground underfoot was wet and Derek was struggling to pick anything up around the abandoned tanker.

There was blood sprayed across the inside, smeared across the inside of the door as if the victim had reached for it in his last moments when he’d collapsed in the seat. In all their years on the road Derek had learned to pick apart scents with relative ease, isolate what he needed. As he searched around the tanker as best he could, his brow furrowed at the lingering, foreign scent, so faint he’d nearly missed it.

“Marin said she’d send us over what the FBI found on disappearances in this area, mostly local campfire stories to scare the kids, but there may be some connection to what’s happening here,” Chris said, standing back, keeping clear so he wouldn’t get in Derek’s way as he circled the tanker. “Anything?” he prompted when Derek didn’t say anything.

“Something. I’ve never come across it before…”

He looked around, but the rain had long ago washed away any scent or tracks from anything outside of the cab.

Chris sighed then, doubling back to the trunk of the _Camaro_ to drag out a shotgun, before he started out onto the deserted road toward the cross-section.

No mist billowed, no sudden coldness gripped them. Beyond the black cross of the road, the grass grew up in dark, heavy tufts. Further back, the trees seemed unnaturally still. He frowned up at the weathered wooden sign with letters so blurred even he couldn’t make them out, his hand reaching out instinctively to touch the post, trying to find _any _sense for what they were dealing with.

There was a particularly weathered looking tree that stood just a few feet out from the others across the grass. It was insignifcant and probably not noticeable to any ordinary senses, but it was the movement of a crow settling on its branches that drew his attention. It ruffled its feathers as if disturbed, as if struggling to get its balance, as if it were under the same thrall of discomfiting _wrongness _that Derek felt nipping at the edges of his mind.

Then the crow opened its beak and called out in a long, drawn out wail into the darkness. Not a bird’s caw but a foreboding yowl like that of a cat’s warning cry.

“…whatever it was, for whatever reason the victim stopped, it made our guy tear at his own skin until he was bleeding…” Chris said as if he hadn’t heard anything at all, except he sounded further away than he actually was. “…him bash his head against the inside of his own truck until he found his gun and blew his brains out all over the windshield. I know plenty of things that can make a man do that, but…”

Chris’s voice seemed to trail off into the air as if taken by an imaginary breeze, just as Derek’s fingers slotted into four old, deep gouges in the wood of the post. Everything stopped as he stared. Claw marks. He drew in a breath, letting his own claws extend into the markings.

They were similar but more curved, definitely not a werewolf’s.

His vision lurched. He felt the snap of detachment as his senses were swallowed in some invisible mist, something that swirled him up away from everything, like he was watching it all unravel away from his body.

Light and sound ripped through the night and everything was swallowed up by chaos.

An SUV tore along the road, bypassing the rest-stop completely and screeching to a halt right across the crossroads. Derek’s shook as if doused with icy water, jerking his hand back from the sign, watching as Chris cocked the shotgun. Blinding headlights lit up the road and all the doors of the SUV flew open.

Nothing in Derek’s head seemed to make sense. He squinted but the strangers who’d climbed out of the car, unmistakeably hunters, had this aura around them, _everything _did, even Chris and when Derek looked down, even his hands even they looked out of focus and foggy.

He staggered back, his throat tight as he tried to make a sound but forgot how to summon words. Chris’s back was to him and the words tumbling from the hunters’ lips sounded garbled and nonsensical, like he was hearing them under water.

Movement drew Derek’s eye and he jerked his gaze sideways in time to see a deer lift its head from among the dense grass, caught in the glare of the headlights, stunned by them. Derek felt his bones shake as a low canine growl rumbled across the grass toward him, like another warning, like it was telling him…

The garbelled noises of the hunters got louder and then a sound like a muffled gunshot rented the night and Derek’s shoulder with sharp agony. He slammed to the ground as the electric fire of wolfsbane seized his veins and sent him into crippling spasms. He cried out without words, twisting against his will as Chris surged toward their enemy.

Everything was consumed by sky and sound, separated from him by miles of intangible water. The same something that had caught that crow and deer had hold of him now, dragging him deeper and deeper…

God, his chest hurt, it _ached _like something was boring a hole through him, opening him up wider and wider and Chris was fighting those hunters alone. He could feel the wolfsbane so close to his heart, eating him up.

The raven soared across the sky, as if finally free from the invisible wrongness that had stalled him on his way, and then, suddenly, all the noise stopped and Derek managed to wrench his head to the side enough to see where Chris stood. The shotgun was limp in his hands, like a marionette without strings.

One hunter, the one who had shot Derek was splayed across the ground. Blood spread across his chest where Chris had retaliated, while the other two were frozen beside Chris.

The glare of the headlights was too much. Derek’s head fell back against the hard road and he winced as breathing became harder, as pain became everything.

One warm hand touched his chest, where the fire had turned icy with its intensity, making everything dead and numb. His heart, that had started sluggishly failing at the direct contact, gave a stronger stutter at the touch, even though he couldn’t feel it. At least not until the fingertips seemed to reach into him, with such overwhelming pressure he choked out a breath, claws curling in the dirt around him.

Then, as suddenly as it’d come, the pressure in his chest was gone.

When he squinted through the dark fog that was his vision, from where he floated in the cold, numb place between the sky and the hard ground, he saw a pale face above him in the darkness and the glint of a blood-stained bullet. The bullet that had moments before been lodged in his chest.

Awareness danced in and out of his reach.

Drugged on the lingering pain, even as his body healed itself, he watched the chaos continue through a blur. The pale-faced creature above him twisted toward the hunters. Like the movement of his head was the swish of a conductor’s baton, the two hunters left standing snapped into action, guns turning on each other and firing.

Time passed with disorientating, detached confusion. It could’ve been moments or hours before Derek rose shakily to his feet, body aching as it always did after contact with wolfsbane, but he found himself staring listlessly at the scene before him.

The three apparently werewolf-hating hunters lay motionless on the ground, their heartbeats easily absent, even as Derek’s senses trickled back into focus. Chris staggered back as if suddenly released from a frozen prison. He blinked at their surroundings, looking as disoriented as Derek had felt moments before. Then his equilibrium seemed to snap back and he raised his gun again, turning it on the pale creature in a heap at Derek’s feet.

“No!” Derek held out a hand, stepping forward to put himself between Chris and his target.

“He did this, Derek! You felt what he did, he messed with us, with those guys,” Chris gestured with his head back at the dead hunters but didn’t move his gaze or his gun from his target. “He’s what’s been killing things out here on the crossroads.”

Derek stared into Chris’s eyes, saw the startled, wary light in them, the frantic grasp for control that his friend usually held so easily. He wasn’t fully himself. Derek wondered if being a wolf heightened his recovery or not but either way, he knew he couldn’t let Chris pull the trigger. He licked his dry lips, tasting the bitter tang of his own blood where it had regurgitated from the bullet that would’ve killed him, had those fingers not dug it out at that moment. Then he looked down at his feet.

He slowly lowered himself to his haunches, still a little shaky as he looked over the prone form. The man was pale, face sprinkled with moles, fingers long and painted with Derek’s blood from where he’d dug the bullet out.

“But he didn’t kill us, Chris.”

The guy couldn’t have been much younger than him. However, the thick lashes resting against fine, if dirt-smudged, cheekbones, ragged clothing and unkempt, wild hair all gave him this young, waifish look that only made the protective instincts already riled in Derek soar.

He felt Chris come to stand beside him, but his gun was lowered now, his body language more settled.

“He dug the bullet out of you and then those hunters just turned on each other, I saw it all through this…this _haze _and then he just…”

Derek tore his gaze away from the crumpled man to look up at his partner, only to find Chris too was staring down at the pale face, brow furrowed with uncertain recognition.

“Something in him just seemed to snap like…like a sleepwalker waking up or someone jerking awake from a nightmare.” Chris shook his head slightly, as if he realised his words didn’t make sense, mind still foggy from the mist that had descended over them beforehand. “Then he just dropped unconscious.”

Derek set his jaw, mind racing with a hundred questions even as he realised what he was going to do.

“Help me get him to the car?”

*

They cleaned up the scene with practiced thoroughness. Marin’s request for them to look into this hadn’t exactly come through official channels and they didn’t want to be tied to anything anyone might find out here, even if it was highly unlikely anyone would be back. Their mysterious charge remained a dead weight in the back seat of the _Camaro _the entire time, not even waking when they quietly manoeuvred him inside their motel room.

“Something just seemed to click back into place inside him,” Chris murmured as he passed a cup of instant coffee to Derek. He didn’t even know how long he’d sat there, watching the unconscious man they’d bound on one of the beds with mountain ash twine around his wrists and ankles. The bonds had been blessed by the Hale pack’s emissary, once tied together, they could not be broken by a supernatural being, only a human, the same way a line of the ash could not be crossed or broken.

Emissaries were meant to hold the balance, strictly speaking. But Deaton seemed to consider what he and Chris did as an extension of that, because he regularly supplied them with useful things that they couldn’t easily acquire elsewhere. Not and rely on without a doubt, anyway.

Deaton’s supplies hadn’t let them down before, but even with the trust they placed in him, neither of them thought they’d relax enough to sleep.

“It was like a light of recognition or…I don’t know, but something changed. One minute he was this incognizant creature, moving without really reacting and the next…” Chris’s voice trailed off, but even as he spoke he was watching the prone form on the bed, vigilant as always. They bounced theories and possibilities off each other like questions. It’d been like this for years now, a camaraderie or brotherhood that went deeper than blood.

Ever since Chris had stopped his own father and sister from trying to take down the Hales for no reason other than they were a respected, powerful werewolf pack, there had been a pact of sorts with what was left of the Argents and the Hales. Together they all hunted those who hunted the innocent, both human and supernatural. When Derek had turned eighteen, he’d taken off with Chris and started helping people beyond the borders of their home county.

They did a pretty good job of it too, if Derek said so himself. Between the Hales’ experience of the supernatural and the records the Argents had access to, their firepower and human contacts, they were unstoppable. But they’d never seen anything like this before and Derek pored over the bestiary while Chris made a few phone calls, trying to at least figure out what they were dealing with before the creature, the man on the bed, awoke.

They’d underestimated their sheer exhaustion though. They’d gone from job to job without any time to recover and so Derek wasn’t surprised to find himself startling awake in his armchair, having dozed off. Chris had slumped over the table nearby, fast asleep and the grey glow of early morning trickled through the thin curtains.

Derek froze at the sight of the man sitting upright on the bed. His long fingers were wrapped around his drawn up knees, chin resting against his knuckles as he watched Derek and Chris both in the quiet dimness. His heartbeat thudded just a fraction faster than a human’s and when Derek slowly rose to his feet, the diminutive light caught in the young man’s eyes like a cat’s in the darkness, before flickering away like a trick of the light.

Derek felt hypnotised by him, not because of his otherness or the power he felt radiating from him even now, barely contained, but the vulnerable humanity of him. Because he did smell human, but also didn’t. He did look it though, brown eyes bright in the muted light, pale skin peeking through tears in his worn clothing. He felt a twist of recognition in him from somewhere and frowned into the silence.

“Where…where am I?” The voice was deeper than Derek had expected, rough from lack of use, thin as if the man were on the brink of crumbling. He shivered lightly, pulling his arms tighter around his legs and Derek moved without even thinking, dragging the sheet off the other bed and dropping it around the stranger’s shoulders. He hesitated mid-motion when the man’s gaze turned up to him in evident surprise at the kind gesture and Derek swallowed, slowly lowering it around him, before stepping back.

Those eyes looked more dark amber than brown up close.

“In a motel room in _Dew Creek_**, **uh…_California_, that is…” Derek moistened his lips, surveying him carefully. “What do you remember?”

There was a long moment of nothing and then the man exhaled shakily. He squeezed his eyes shut and ducked his head to rest it on his hands were they cupped his knees, dug in tight. “I remember everything,” he whispered shakily.

“How long have you been out there in the crossroads?” Derek asked at last, forehead creasing again. How had he even survived out there dressed like that for so long?

Movement from behind him made Derek start and he glanced back to find Chris approaching, his face carefully devoid of emotion. “Just over two years,” Chris said neutrally, “the local myths and stories ended and the real murders started around the time a blue _Jeep_ came off the road at the crossroads.”

So Chris had found something in all his researching then, while Derek’s search through the bestiary had come up empty. The toll of Derek’s brush with death had drained him more than he’d thought then, since he’d passed out before Chris could even share that with him before.

“The _Jeep _was registered to a young man by the name of Stilinski, who was on his way back from visiting colleges further upstate. It was a freak accident, the Jeep was old, the brakes failed and the car crashed straight into the trees. The driver’s body was never found.”

A sense of understanding dawned and Derek realised why the man, _Stiles, _looked so familiar. His face had been the talk of _Beacon Hills_ every time he and Chris returned there. He was Sheriff Stilinski’s only son. Derek hadn’t known him well, but enough to say hello whenever he’d bumped into him at the station or when he’d caught the kid trying to eavesdrop whenever Derek’s mother had met with the Sheriff about supernatural matters.

Stiles nodded slowly as Chris spoke, his bound hands wrapped in the blanket dragging across his chin over and over as he stared at a random point on the floor. It was as if his mind were entirely somewhere else.

“I remember,” he breathed after a long moment, just as Derek was beginning to suspect words were beyond him. He looked suspended in a state of shock, just barely functioning. “I remember waking up on the grass and…everything hurt and then something in me just…snapped, surged up and made everything so far away, still there just…” He licked his dry lips. “Like time and everything just didn’t register and I…” He pressed his covered knuckles to his mouth, still shaking, still not looking at either Derek or Chris. “I just went along for the ride, as if I were moving along in catatonia with this tide drawing me back and forth…”

Derek shared a look with Chris.

“You were possessed?” Chris asked carefully.

Stiles finally lifted his gaze to them. “No, I…no. It felt like it…it came from inside me. Rose up or…” He tipped his head, making an abortive move to drag his fingers through his tangled hair. The more he spoke, the more of his equilibrium he seemed to recover, though his voice remained rough and shaky. “It saved me,” he breathed, still staring at the corner of the bed without really seeing it. “And it destroyed me.”

He didn’t so much as twitch or speak again for some time, during which Chris watched him thoughtfully and Derek turned into the tiny ‘kitchen’ area devised of kettle and sink. He brewed the coffee black, since they had no fridge for milk but then dropped three large spoonfuls of sugar into it, before offering it to Stiles. Their fingers brushed as he took it with unsteady hands and Derek started at the chill to his fingers.

“You’re as cold as ice,” he said, stealing a glance at Chris again. “Is that normal for you?” he asked Stiles.

“I…I don’t know. I…I remember everything but I haven’t really felt…”

Chris let out a rough sigh of frustration and dragged one of the hard wooden chairs from over by the table to sit beside the bed and watch Stiles’s reaction closely as he spoke. “What happened out there on the crossroads then? With the people that have disappeared? With us and those hunters tonight?”

Stiles sipped at the mug slowly and Derek hesitated for a moment before snatching up the other blanket from where it had been folded up at the bottom of the bed and dropping it around Stiles too. He got that Chris was trying to keep a professional distance, an open mind to what had happened, but there was something in Stiles’s eyes, shocked and lost that called to him, reminded him of himself from so long ago. He had the same kind of haunted sheen to his eyes, like a man forced apart from his youth far too soon.

It’d changed everything when he’d watched his family home burn to the ground, when he’d realised his family could’ve died that night, if Chris hadn’t realised what his father and sister were up to. When he’d seen the devastation cold-blooded malice could cause.

He’d been a kid that afternoon when he’d come home and gone to bed, but when he’d been woken up by the smell of smoke, when he’d been trapped at the top of the house, when he’d heard his family’s screams, he’d woken up with all traces of childhood gone.

It could’ve been worse, so much worse, but even now he still dreamed of fire and smoke and screaming, of Kate Argent’s laughter, even now he remembered tearing open his door and seeing his mother holding Cora in her arms. The corridor had been aflame between them, the smoke rising heavy with mountain ash and wolfsbane, with no chance of escape.

His bedroom had been at the end of the hall and when the smoke had billowed up the stairs it’d formed an impassable wall of toxic fumes, separating him from his family. He’d seen a terrible moment when his mother had hesitated, frozen by the fear of potentially leaving him behind to save the others. But then Chris had broken the barrier outside, the fire department close at his heels and in the end they had all survived.

They each felt the trauma of that night even now, in different ways but Derek? He’d been angry. He’d acted out and distanced himself, even from the person he used to be. Then when he’d turned eighteen, when Chris Argent had stopped by the house to brief his parents on the latest supernatural movements in his weekly sweep through the territory, Derek had asked to go with him.

When the anger had faded, Derek had been left lost and alone in a sea of people who didn’t know how to talk to him. If it hadn’t been for Chris, he would’ve remained that way. He would’ve looked exactly as Stiles had earlier, all the fight drained out of him like nothing was worth fighting for anymore. It struck a chord in Derek and he felt his insides twist with an aching longing to help him, more than any of the people he’d saved from paranormal activity in the last few years.

He of all people knew that monsters weren’t always the ones that looked monstrous, but he still struggled to reconcile the quiet creature before him with the carnage out on the crossroads.

“I…existed there, within or…” Stiles swallowed, still distant and Derek wondered if he really was in shock from coming back to himself so abruptly out there on the road. Then, suddenly, Stiles sat up a little straighter, his bound hands tightening around the mug in his grasp as he looked straight into Derek’s eyes. They didn’t flash or flare but there was a steadfast determination in them now, as if he’d recovered some inner strength the jolt back to reality had knocked out of him before.

“They crossed paths with a _bies _and the glimpse into their soul turned their minds in on themselves.” His gaze flickered to Chris and Derek equally then. “My mom used to tell me, before, she said it was an old family story. I didn’t realise there was any truth to it until it was me out there in the woods.”

“A _bies. Biesy_,” Chris repeated, and Derek wondered yet again how long Chris had been awake and succeeding in his research. It had so often been _Chris_ recovering from the wounds their hunting trips had inflicted, while Derek researched or had to finish up the mission, that it felt odd for it to be the other way around. For _Derek_ to be the recovering wounded.

“Derek mentioned the crow and we both heard the deer. It rang a bell. So with some help from the Hale Pack’s emissary, we had a little look back through your mother’s Polish roots.” Chris sat back in his seat. “_When you travel where the roads cross, when the cat howls and the wolf caws like the crow, the innocent calling in voices not their own, your soul will be gazed upon. Its tarnishes will rust, the cracks will shatter and the knots will twist in on themselves to detriment of souls heavy with sin. Biesy can penetrate and twist your soul back on itself, if there are flaws for its claws to sink into.”_

“That’s the name for it,” Stiles murmured quietly. “What I am.”

Chris’s lips gave a subtle smile then. “It’s the origin of your inheritance, anyway. There are some aspects that don’t quite match the traits and behaviours of a _bies_. They traditionally lived in forests, sometimes preying on travellers but–”

“Chris,” Derek said warningly, cutting him off. Where Chris travelled with fascination for the creatures he came across, Derek had only ever really been in it for the sense of purpose. Chris got carried away with the history sometimes, which was a part of him that Derek had always admired, but not right then.

“The Hale’s Emissary said in the last century, there were instances where dormant supernatural inheritances manifested under the presence of great trauma.”

Stiles’s face remained stoic but his eyes and voice betrayed everything as he fixed them both on Chris. “Like being thrown from a car and lying in the woods dying? That kind of trauma?”

When Chris didn’t answer, Derek carefully reached across and eased the cup from Stiles’s grip, noting the slight warmth to his fingertips now. He turned to set it on the tiny counter and stared at it, even as he asked the question that gnawed at the back of his mind.

“So if you’re a demon who preys on travellers, why didn’t we die out there? Why did I feel…why didn’t we go insane and kill each other or ourselves?”

“Not all _biesy _are inherently evil, there are some that only hunt the wicked. They are an eclectic mix, like werewolves, like humans,” Chris said quietly, but his voice sounded troubled, heavy with the same doubt that held Derek by the gut. They both had blood on their hands. They’d never harmed an innocent, of course, but they could hardly be called innocent.

“Your souls were clean.”

Turning, Derek found Stiles’s eyes on him again and he swallowed with the intensity of them, burnished amber in the early morning light that was now glowing more intensely through the curtains.

It wasn’t a conscious thing, Derek realised. Stiles hadn’t decided to twist the minds of those people beyond recognition. His baser instinct or the innate thrall, whatever it was, it could only do evil when it touched evil.

“The animals are innocent, they are freed almost instantly, some people pass through and get no more than a shudder of sudden guilt or discomfort. That driver, he was…he wasn’t. He went insane within seconds. The hunters, they realised they’d become more monstrous that the beasts they hunted but you…you were caught in the grey mist in the middle, neither here nor there, both of you. You’ve done bad things but only to help others.”

Derek hesitated. “So where do you fit in all that then?”

Stiles shifted so that his arms wrapped around his drawn up thighs more fully beneath the blankets, even though the stretch must have tugged at his bound wrists. “I don’t know.” But for that small weakness he lifted his chin with defiance to the fear radiating from him, noticeable only to Derek’s keen nose. “So you’ve found the monster at the crossroads, what are you going to do with me now, huh? Kill me?”

Rising to his feet, Chris moved to his open duffle bag on the far side of the room, close to the bathroom door. There he stooped, rummaging within. When he straightened, there was the gleam of a blade in his hand and while Derek frowned, not afraid but confused, he could hear Stiles’s already faster heartbeat thunder rapidly.

Not as resigned to death as he might act then.

“First, you’re going to answer some more questions for us…” Chris said, leaning in, the blade gleaming as he stared so hard into Stiles’s eyes it was as if _he _had the ability to see the quality of souls.

Sometimes, Derek thought he could, human or not.

Whatever he saw there, whatever he’d seen out on the road where the eerie glimmer in Stiles’s eyes had been burned out by that brilliant amber, he seemed satisfied. There was a jerk of the knife and Stiles flinched as the mountain ash twine fell away into his lap.

“…And after that, you will shower, then eat.”

Stiles looked down in shock at the broken wisps of twine, its blessed power broken now the circle it made was cut by human hands. Derek watched as he licked his lips.

“And then?” Stiles asked shakily.

“And then we’ll take you back to _Beacon Hills_,” Derek said, not needing to consult Chris on the matter, they knew each other well enough now and it hadn’t been the first time they’d rescued someone more than human. “My mother is the alpha of the pack there. She can…she can teach you to control whatever is inside of you.” He thought for a beat. “And last I heard, your father had been brought into the know, had been helping with supernatural matters.”

“My dad?” Stiles asked, almost in disbelief.

Derek nodded.

*

After steering Stiles into the bathroom and closing the door, Chris and Derek had shared one of their wordless exchanges. Then Chris had taken a call from Marin outside on his way to grab breakfast from the deli just down from the motel.

Derek pulled on fresh clothes then rooted through his bag to see if he could find something to fit Stiles. They were of a height but Stiles was a lot leaner. A _lot _leaner. He dragged out a t-shirt, jeans and a sweater and knocked on the bathroom door. “Hey, Stiles? I’ve got some clothes for you.”

When he knocked again and heard no answer. He couldn’t even hear the sound of the shower running anymore. He hesitated for just a moment before pushing the door open, staring in surprise at the sight of Stiles standing in the tiny bathroom, a towel wrapped around his waist and staring into the mirror. His hair was dripping, standing up in disarray and clumps of it lay in the sink alongside a pair of scissors.

Slowly, Derek walked into the room and when Stiles held his gaze in the mirror he’d smeared clear of condensation, he didn’t look away.

“Clothes,” Derek said softly, gesturing with the little pile before setting it down on the closed toilet seat. He didn’t ask if he was okay, he didn’t ask what was wrong. Derek may have been socially challenged but he knew the things you needed to hear and not hear when you felt like you’d lost yourself.

He reached just outside the door for Chris’s bag, finding the pouch with his clippers in and sliding the adjustable guard back to a shorter length. “Do you need any help?” he asked, the clippers obvious in his hand and Stiles held his gaze in the mirror for a moment longer, the lingering steam starting to fog up the glass again even as they watched. Then he nodded, letting his eyes drift to his own face.

“It was really short before I…” He chewed the inside of his mouth for a second. “It feels weird, never seeing it grow, never seeing all the changes. The world _literally _carried on changing around me, even my own body, without me realising, totally out of my control.” He sounded more wistful than sad but Derek nodded his understanding.

This was Stiles’s way of taking back control over something, even over something as insignificant as his hair. It wasn’t insignificant at all. It was part of his identity. Derek had been so freaked out after the fire he’d gotten a freaking tattoo so, yeah, he got it.

“I’ve met you before, you know? You were a couple of years ahead of me in school, the basketball star and when I used to hang around the station I’d see you come in with your mom sometimes.” Stiles gave a little self-deprecating smile, “I guess I know why she worked so closely with my dad now, huh? She was trying to cover up the supernatural stuff, probably trying to build some sort of trust with him before she brought him in the know, am I right?”

Derek gave a little shrug. “It helps, to have law enforcement in the know. Some of Chris’s contacts that help us out are FBI and CIA and it just makes things easier.”

Stiles nodded, his mind clearly racing a mile a minute, trying to let every tiny detail slot into place.

“You were like…some kind of whizz kid at school, right? I remember they late you take some of our senior classes.”

Blinking at him owlishly, Stiles fingered the edge of the sink distractedly as his thoughts seemed to cast back, further into a place where his body had been purely his own.

Even as a born wolf, Derek still felt the rise of instincts, of inner strength that sometimes felt harder to hold back, especially when his temper or survival instincts were tested. It wasn’t like possession, more like something clouded his perception or understanding until he just acted rather. It wasn’t new to someone who lived in this world, wasn’t hard to understand. But to Stiles, who had been raised human, this was all new and startlingly different.

“Would you mind?” Stiles asked, turning to face him at last and gesturing to the clippers in Derek’s hand. “I just…”

“You don’t have to explain.”

Stiles gave him tight smile and then looked around the bathroom. “Umm…” He picked up the clothes, setting them just outside the door on top of the drawers there and ducking back inside to sit on the closed toilet awkwardly.

Derek plugged the clippers in, checking the guard again but as he turned them on, he saw Stiles shiver and cut the power, reaching for another towel and wrapping it around Stiles’s damp shoulders.

“Thanks,” Stiles murmured, looking determinedly at Derek’s knees. “I just can’t seem to get warm now, I guess. I feel so cold all the time. Which is weird, after so long of not really feeling anything at all.”  


“I’ll be quick, and you can get dressed.” He wanted to promise Stiles he’d feel better after that, feel more himself but he knew nothing would assure Stiles of that apart from experiencing it first-hand so he said nothing. He clicked the clippers back on and brought them to his head.

To his credit, Stiles didn’t flinch, he stayed perfectly still. His heart settling into the slightly increased rhythm that was normal for him as Derek buzzed away the knotted hair in long smooth strokes. He was hardly practiced, though Chris often let him borrow his clippers to trim his stubble. This wasn’t quite the same, but he managed not to nick Stiles and kept a fairly even hand, even when he felt Stiles’s swell of emotion as big clumps of knotted hair fell to the floor around them, as potent as the smell of Derek’s own body wash in the steamy room.

Eventually he set the clippers on the side of the sink to be cleaned later, then he dusted off the clinging severed hairs off the back of Stiles’s neck with tentative brushes of his fingers. Stiles shuddered in a way that was unrelated to the cold then and tipped his head up to look at Derek.

“Sorry,” he murmured sheepishly. “Being touched just feels…” His face burned then and he stood up, dusting himself off of clumps of hair. “Sorry I made it weird.”

Derek laughed kindly. “Trust me, live a while in my world and nothing is weird.”

Not even a man who had woken up nearly two years after an accident to find he wasn’t as human as he’d initially thought. Woken from a dream that wasn’t really a dream, with no sense of time passed and yet a chilling, guilt-ridden awareness of everything that had happened.

Stiles smiled gratefully, moving to the mirror and taking a little breath before smearing his hand across the fogged up glass. He blinked at his reflection, but this time he didn’t seem to avoid looking at himself. He ran his fingers over his shorn hair, and Derek thought those long fingers lingered a little where he’d touched his neck moments before.

“Maybe my dad will recognise me now,” Stiles said, mostly to himself, his voice a little thick.

Derek thought about the way Stiles had been drifting in his own head all this time, not like a coma or mental prison but like an extended dream. Perhaps it had been his body, his heritage’s way of making him safe, of saving his life and letting his mind heal from what had happened, but it’d also left him missing nearly two years of his life and everything that came with it. His dad, his life, the cathartic comfort of human contact.

Even Derek, who was probably the epitome of solitary wolf knew the power a friendly touch could carry.

It was like no time had really passed for Stiles and yet it had, he’d seen it all, if a little unclearly.

Derek reached out before he could second-guess himself and set his hand on Stiles’s shoulder, squeezing softly. “He’ll be glad to see you.”

Stiles nodded thickly and when his eyes drifted to the wet, grey cord around his wrists, the remnants of the twine they’d bound him with earlier, Derek realised what he must be thinking.

“It’s not in control anymore, Stiles. It’s just you now.”

Stiles gave a shaky, hollow laugh. “And what if it takes me over again, huh? What if it…what if I’m just like a bomb waiting to go off?”

Derek didn’t know how he could explain that to someone who’d never experienced a surge of instincts filling them up until they felt almost weightless in their own body. He frowned as he tried to assuage some of the apprehension tightening in Stiles’s muscles.

“You’re not. It doesn’t work that way. It’s not…” Derek inwardly cursed his own inarticulacy. “It’s a part of you, and just like your arms, your legs, your words? You can learn to control it.”

Lifting his chin with the same defiance hiding his terror, Stiles challenged bitterly, “no one ever made people blow their brains out at a truck-stop when they were learning to walk.”

“That’s not going to happen to you,” Derek promised vehemently, “we won’t let it.”

Stiles’s fingers curled into fists at his sides, shaking visibly as he ducked his head. “I’m stronger than you. You can’t stop me.”

Control over someone’s mind was a formidable power indeed, Derek wasn’t stupid enough to deny it. That was without considering what physical strength a bies might have. For Stiles to have survived in the wilderness all this time, he had to be more durable now than a human at the very least.

“I won’t have to,” Derek said easily, with the same easy confidence Chris and his mom and everyone else had offered him when he’d felt like _he _was a bomb waiting to go off. “You’re not an evil creature to be fended off. What you are, what power you have only corrupts when it’s touched by bad people.” He looked Stiles straight in the eyes then. “And you’re not bad, Stiles. You’re not even close.”

He’d show him that somehow.

Such fervent assurances, trust and confidence were something he rarely offered, but he was making all kinds of exceptions for Stiles. Drawing his hand back, he turned to leave the room.

“Derek?”

He twisted enough to look back and found Stiles watching him.

“Thank you.”

*

It was about a day’s drive back to Beacon Hills without stopping, but they took the trip leisurely, which oddly enough Stiles seemed to be grateful for. Derek supposed he was torn between wanting his dad, wanting familiarity and fearing just how he might find things once he arrived. He was most likely dreading having to truly deal with reality, like it’d be confirmed this wasn’t all a horrible dream once he saw for himself how the world had carried on without him.

They stopped often, and on the third stop, for gas this time, Derek felt a little pulse of inspiration and asked Stiles to give him a hand carrying some snacks back to the car. Stiles had shrugged and followed him inside. When Derek pushed a basket and his credit card into his arms and told him to grab ‘a little of everything’ while he visited the restroom, however, Stiles looked equal parts overwhelmed, baffled and eager.

When they met back up at the checkout and Derek saw Stiles’s face, some of that eagerness had risen just a little above the rest as Stiles showed him the contents of his bag of snacks.

Derek felt a little light swell in him at the image and a smile ticked at the corner of his lips. “This is great, thanks,” he assured him, in a perfect echo of how Chris had responded when he had given Derek the exact same opportunity on their first ever ‘hunting trip’ together.

It’d been so quiet that day in the car, Derek sullen, withdrawn and angry at everything and Chris had broken the ice, told him to cut the bullshit. He’d then given him his credit card, told him to fill up a tote bag with as much junk food as would fit. Derel wasn’t sure if it had been the sugar that’d helped, or the ridiculous flare of independence it brought, even if it had been with someone else’s money.

It hadn’t really made sense then and it didn’t now. All Derek knew was things had changed in that moment for him.

Stiles gave a small, almost uncertainly shy smile when Derek offered him first pick from the bag once they were back in the car. He pulled the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups out and the contentedness that subtly bubbled in the air as he chewed made something in Derek’s chest hum. He thought maybe something had changed for Stiles too just then, even if it made no sense at all.

He supposed, more than anything else, it showed Stiles that he could do something as simple as pay for some junk food at a checkout like a normal person still and the world wouldn’t end.

Chris gave him the side-eye as they pulled away, but Derek carefully ignored him.

*

Time and connections with people grew faster, Derek thought, when you were alone with them for significant amounts of time with only the road and the radio for entertainment. You learned things about people that you didn’t learn for weeks in the real world, some things that mattered, some things that didn’t. It was part of what had enabled Derek to come out of his shell so much in the beginning.

When Stiles looked comfortable, or as close to it as could be expected, his eyes got this shine to them, even if his fingers did toy with the thumbholes in the sweatshirt he’d borrowed. As the sun started to dip beyond the horizon, Derek started to realise that was just Stiles, fidgeting, always moving at least a little, always seeking something to occupy his mind.

It was a stark contrast to the cool, predatory stillness of the bies that had lurked out on the crossroads.

*

They came across a closure in one of the main roads and had to plan a different route. Derek noticed Stiles starting to get antsy when they waited to turn round in the small queue that hard formed around them. It was Chris, though, that twisted in his seat to face him.

“Stop panicking,” he said, with a voice that just…_willed _it to happen, with such gentle conviction that it made Stiles visibly pause as he met his gaze.

“You didn’t see you out there on the crossroads,” Chris continued. “We didn’t do anything to bring your subconscious to the forefront. You came to all on your own. Like a light suddenly went on behind your eyes.”

Stiles looked sticken for a heartbeat, mouth moving soundlessly, long fingers curling in one of the thumbholes of the borrowed sweater. “That’s what it felt like,” he admitted eventually in a soft voice, eyes turning back to the outside world, where an RV was having trouble turning with so many cars around them, so many people, more than Stiles had been confronted with since he’d come back to himself.

“It was like being half-asleep in the dark, thinking you’ve got another few hours of sleep ahead, curling back up under the sheets and then jerking awake to blinding sunlight nearly two hours late.”

The fact that he’d been aware of the things his baser instincts had done while he’d slumbered, in a dreamlike state where the passage of time hadn’t flowed the same? It did a lot to explain his coherency and resilience now, Derek thought, although part of him also attributed that to Stiles’s strength of character. The one he was slowly but surely getting to know.

“Do you think when you saw us out there, the _bies _part of you, the part in control, associated us with safety?” Derek asked doubtfully. He knew about compartmentalising, which Stiles had confessed he was a veteran of, ever since he’d lost his mom. Derek knew how your mind, or even your baser instincts could store away trauma until you were safe enough to stop and patch yourself up, like a soldier on a battlefield. But he just didn’t get why Stiles had ‘awoken’ that night.

Why then of all nights?

“I think you underestimate the power of seeing a friendly face in the middle of a wasteland,” Chris said wistfully when Stiles didn’t answer. “But it’s more than that.”

In the back, Stiles shifted, meeting Derek’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. “You just felt…safe, I guess. You reminded me of home and…_goodness_, and when you got shot, I knew I had to save you, or make the bies save you or…whatever. I sort of…pushed, I guess? And by the time I had that bullet out of you, it all hit me in a rush.”

There was silence for a long time. Then…

“Hope is a powerful thing,” Chris mused, more to himself than either Derek or Stiles, eyes ahead as he finally had enough space to turn back the way they’d come to find their alternate route.

*

Their diverted route took them close to the town where Chris’s daughter lived, just outside of _Beacon County _borders_. _Both Derek and Stiles had agreed they didn’t mind the stop, but when Chris tossed Derek the keys and said he’d be back in a couple of hours, Derek thought he sensed the moment Stiles realised what this meant.

They were in a busy town, bustling with early evening life and Stiles’s anxiety at being surrounded by so many people, it was palpable.

Derek locked the car. “Come on,” he urged, determined to show him, even a little that what was inside him didn’t have to be feared. It didn’t have to force him to hide away from fear of losing control of some imagined beast inside him.

“I wonder why I don’t have like…some phobia of trees now or cars or whatever,” Stiles wondered aloud as they walked down the leafy street. He was talking hastily in an attempt to either anchor or distract himself, Derek wasn’t sure.

Stiles hadn’t really shown interest in anything, which Derek got, that was how these things worked, after all. You lost the little sparks of pleasure that even the things you loved most gave you. It’d take time to get that back.

Food seemed to cheer him up though, so when the changing breeze brought with it the scent of fresh doughnuts and coffee, he lead them around the corner to cut through the little park toward the coffee shop. He’d been here a few times, hung out here when they’d been passing through for something and he hadn’t wanted to intrude on Chris’s time with his daughter, Allison.

“Trauma isn’t always textbook,” Derek assured him and he felt Stiles’s gaze linger on him as they walked, but he didn’t press Derek to elaborate.

He did jerk slightly, nearly walking into Derek in his urgency to keep clear of the distracted jogger that went passed with her dog.

“You won’t hurt anyone.”

Stiles’s head whipped around and he glared at Derek then. “You don’t know that, okay? Don’t make promises you can’t keep. You weren’t there, you didn’t feel blood on your hands. You didn’t feel the panic of those people when you made their heads explode with their own…_sin _or whatever. _I _did that. You have no idea what I can do to people. You see this fucking kid, this skinny loser you vaguely remember from school but you have no idea the things I can do.”

Derek let him talk, let him rant.

When finally he seemed to lose steam at the edge of the park, his heart pounding wildly and his breathing rough, Derek stopped and looked at him. He looked flushed with indignant anger now, maybe a little bitter fear. All of that was masking this self-destructive belief that this chance he’d been handed, this opportunity for salvation would fall to pieces the second he trusted in it.

“I _do_ know,” Derek said simply, “you’re not an idiot. You know I felt what you were capable of, saw the reports of what had happened to those assholes the FBI call ‘victims’ because they don’t know the real truth of what they were–”

“That’s… What they did? It doesn’t make it okay, it didn’t give me the right to kill them,” Stiles argued. “My dad is the sheriff, people like him are the law-”

“Because we make them the law,” Derek cut across him. “But what you are, the power that runs through your veins? You didn’t choose that. Your base instinct is to kill the wicked. You had hold of all of us at the crossroads, you were able to tell the difference between killers who killed for the pleasure of it and those who killed to save others. I felt your power.” And it had been like being caught in the eye of a lightning storm. “I know what you’re capable of, that you won’t hurt me or anyone else unless there is a good reason.”

Stiles turned his face away, looking lost again. He stared at the place across the street where two of the local law enforcement were exiting the coffee shop and heading back down the road toward their car.

Stiles had been an aspiring deputy or some sort of law enforcement, like his dad, no doubt, Derek thought. He had a high sense of right and wrong and that had all been turned upside down along with everything else.

_ “Only the very best hunters feel guilt for making even the most justified of kills,”_ Chris had assured him once. It’d taken him a lot less time than it’d probably take Stiles to comprehend that.

“There is no good reason to kill people the way I did, even if it wasn’t…it was still me. I still remember…” Stiles swallowed. “There is no good reason to do that.”

Derek didn’t necessarily agree, and most people he knew didn’t agree either, but he didn’t say so, not now. Instead he exhaled and set his hand on Stiles’s shoulder, leaning in just a little so that Stiles had to meet his gaze. He squeezed.

“I’ve seen a lot of monsters in my time hunting with Chrtis and you _aren’t _a monster. I was there at the crossroads, okay? So you can feel guilty if you want but don’t let that stop you from understanding what’s happening here. You’re too smart for that. You won’t hurt these innocent people around us and you won’t hurt Chris, or me.” He said the latter a little more softly and something in Stiles visibly trembled at that, somewhere inside his eyes, as if he were struggling to hold it all together.

Eventually, he ducked his head and Derek squeezed his shoulder a final time before letting go. The smallest of smiles graced his lips just for Stiles, and he swore he saw a flicker of reassured warmth in his expression before he gestured them toward the coffee shop.

“So how did this happen?” Stiles asked, long fingers picking at the large frosting covered doughnut.

“How did what happen?”

“How did a hunter and a werewolf end up being best bros, saving people and hunting things?”

Derek lifted his head a little, shifting forward in his seat. Stiles’s outburst seemed to have done him good, offered some sort of therapeutic outlet at least. He sipped at his own coffee, wrapping his hands around the cup.

He wasn’t much of a talker, when he and Chris happened across people who needed their help, he wasn’t the kind to share his story or get invested in others more than closing a case required. He left the ‘people-ing’ to Chris. There was something about Stiles that made him want to do more though, to reach out for no reason at all that he could see. Just that he wanted to.

“He’s part of a reputed hunting family, one known for protecting the innocent, human or otherwise. But then one day his sister and father tried to take a major hit on the latter by burning my house down with my family inside it.” He said it all evenly, as if it’d all happened to someone else, in another time, but distance was the only thing that helped it, he’d found.

Slowly but surely, the feelings and memories associated to that horrific night had gotten smaller and smaller. Now he could look back on it unflinching, albeit through a haze of heavy darkness.

“Chris stopped them in time to save my family, and when I was older, Chris took me in, showed me how to turn my anger and fear into something useful instead of destructive.”

Those dextrous fingers paused mid-motion, half way through dissecting the soft, sweet doughnut as Stiles searched his face from hairline to mouth, then back to his eyes. His pupils flickered as if he were picturing everything Derek described, watching it unfold like a cautionary tale.

“He took you along on hunting trips and somewhere along the line you became friends, rather than just hunting partners,” Stiles said at last with a small nod.

It was funny how exposing his darkest moment seemed to have paved the way for a more light-hearted mood. Derek was a big believer that life was full of little moments that built the whole. Right before his eyes, little by little, the apparently ingrained curiosity and interest edged out of Stiles. It was such a small thing, yet such a big step for the man in front of him.

They talked about Stiles’s dad, the time he accidentally handcuffed himself to his dad’s desk while he was a kid. They talked about the time when Derek had hit puberty, and in one of the associated influxes of strength, he’d busted one of the showerheads at school. He’d flooded the locker room and snuck out the back in only a towel, ran all the way home half-naked.

Stiles nearly choked on his coffee at that last. He laughed out loud, surprising himself as much as Derek. It was a glorious sound and for just a second Derek glimpsed the man Stiles Stilinski was supposed to be, smiling almost mischievously and he couldn’t help but smile back.

*

They were just a couple of hours out of Beacon Hills when Derek’s phone buzzed with a message. It was his turn to drive though, so he gestured with his chin to his jacket pocket and Chris fished it out of his pocket and read it with a little frown.

“It’s Braeden.”

“Whose Braeden?” Stiles asked, looking up from where he’d been scrolling with rapt interest through the bestiary on Derek’s laptop. Really, when Derek had told him about it on their way back from the coffee shop, he hadn’t realised how enraptured Stiles would be when presented with information, how he lit up from the inside, grasping at it with everything he had.

Half of the healing process was caring enough to bother with anything, taking interest with anything, Derek thought.

“She’s my sister Laura’s girlfriend, and she’s sort of a bounty hunter.”

“Did she and Malia finish up with the wendigo alright?”

“Wendigo?” Stiles repeated. “As in…flesh eaters?”

“Slow down there, kid,” Chris said good-naturedly, looking back over his shoulder as he unlocked the phone to read the message. “You don’t have to learn everything about our world in a day.”

“I know,” Stiles said sheepishly. “It’s just…I was sort of thrust into this, I want to know what I’m in for.” He pulled the laptop bag next to him a little closer.

“What are you doing?” asked Derek.

“Just swapping to the other battery. I’ll look over whatever I can find on wendigo – wendigos?” The latter, the confusion of plurals seemed to be mostly to himself. His increasing chatter felt like a good thing, though, like a little something of the person he’d been before was still in there.

“Keep an eye on him,” Derek said to Chris, utterly deadpanned, “make sure he doesn’t start looking up the legacy of circumcision in werewolves or something.” But even as Stiles gave a little exhale of surprised laughter that was small yet wondrous, Derek sensed the change in Chris. He’d gone worryingly still and quiet as he’d read the text. “What’s wrong?”

“Braeden says she’s picked up on talk of the_ Colton County _hunters pursuing a werewolf and a human that their hunting buddies were tailing before they disappeared.” Chris’s voice was slow, careful and Derek set his jaw as his words sank in.

“Around _Dew Creek_ by any chance?”

Chris didn’t need to answer. 

He heard the steady breath and the sound of Stiles moistening his lips without looking back at him.

“The hunters from the crossroads,” Stiles said in a quiet voice and Derek knew he was seeing what had happened all over again.

Derek glanced at his reflection in the rear-view mirror before fixing his gaze back on the road. “We’re not far from _Beacon Hills_.”

“She said they were aware of the road closures, were aiming straight for the back roads,” Chris said simply.

The back roads they were currently on after their little detour. So they didn’t have as much of a head start as he’d thought.

Out of instinct, Derek checked the mirror again, this time studying the road behind them. It was getting dark again and there were no cars on the road apart from them. Last he’d heard, the hunters who considered _Colton County_ their jurisdiction had been a broken up, seedy little group of hunters cast out by official families. They didn’t comply with the code, but were they stupid enough to take on one of the most powerful werewolf packs in the country?

“Text my mom and Peter, see if any of the pack can meet us half way, just in case we don’t make it into the territory.” He felt Chris’s momentary pause, the surprise that Derek would so readily ask for help without question evident in his hesitation. They both knew what a momentous development that was.

“I’ll text the sheriff too,” Chris said, looking back at Stiles, as if offering him the opportunity, but Stiles was just staring out the window as if he hadn’t heard them.

Derek’s senses were on high alert as Chris sent out the S.O.S messages. He squeezed the gas pedal harder. A few miles up the road he heard heartbeats over the roar of the _Camaro_, heard voices as he strained but not their words. A glance up the road behind them saw no approaching vehicle but as he rounded the wide, smooth arc of the road, he winced at the glare of full beam headlights.

“Something wrong,” he began quickly, “be–”

A sound like four shotgun rounds exploding from their barrels ripped through the air. The car screamed and Derek knew a sharp jerk, a lurching sensation in the pit of his stomach, the car’s tail end surging up into the air in slow motion. Sharp, disorientated, detached panic seared him like a rush of flame and Derek threw his arm out to pin Chris in the seat. The air bags went off seconds before the car landed hard on its roof, skidding across the road before coming to a harsh, abrupt stop when it collided with a tree.

Derek’s ears were ringing, his head was spinning as he lashed out at the air bag, tearing it to shreds in a bid for freedom. His blood was pounding in his veins. _Get out, get out, get out,_ it thudded wildly. He saw Chris hanging limply from his seatbelt, a jagged cut bleeding from his head, eyes closed but he heard Stiles groaning in pain from the back, heard his movements.

Werewolf or not, everything was disorientating upside down and it took Derek a moment to gather himself enough to slice through his own seatbelt with his claws. “S-_tiles_?” he managed. He had fast healing but the blow from the airbag, the way his head had hit the window when they’d hit the tree, it all still hurt, still made the metallic tang of blood burn his throat.

He assessed himself carefully, finding himself already healing. Chris’s heartbeat was steady too, so hopefully he was just unconscious.

“I’m…” When Stiles’s voice stalled, Derek twisted enough to see where Stiles was hanging from his seatbelt, forearm splinting off in an unnatural direction. Stiles was staring down at it in shock but Derek heard his heartbeat as strong and steady as ever. He knew, he just _knew _somehow. He reached back, one hand bracing Stiles’s bicep while the other grabbed his wounded forearm and snapped.

Stiles screamed, Derek winced but he felt the way Stiles’s bones just went back into place. The limb didn’t protest at all, just clicked back into place as easily as if every inch of bone and muscle had magnetically slotted back. He cupped Stiles’s face, anchoring him, searching his expression but even as he saw brown eyes shiny and blinking blearily through the pain, he could feel the pain was dulling. It was simmering away even as he tried to take it from him.

“You’re like me,” Derek breathed, voice rushed and breathless but no less fervent. When Stiles’s breathing came hard and fast with panic, Derek moved his head to force their eyes to meet, all with Stiles hanging in an awkward, messy tangle in the back of the upside down car. “You’re like _me_,” Derek said again, more firmly. “Your body is already healing. You’re okay, alright? You’re okay.”

Another harsh, rapid breath in, then another, slower this time as Stiles’s eyes flickered wildly, searching Derek’s face. The next breath was slower as Stiles locked onto something in his gaze and he swallowed. Bobbed his head.

“Help me get Chris,” Derek said quickly, slicing through Stiles’s seatbelt. Stiles braced himself on Derek and the battered headrest to stop himself from falling.

“M’more durable than I remember,” Stiles managed as he crawled to the front, wrapping an arm around Chris’s body to hold him steady as Derek tore through the deflating air bag and seatbelt.

“That’s both a good and bad thing right now,” Derek said, kicking the rest of the passenger-side window out before ducking down. The roof had been crushed in slightly from the impact, so it was a tight squeeze. The glass fragments and crumpled metal scraped at his shoulders as he crawled through. He braced his hands on the ground, but before he could push himself to his feet, he felt the ominous press of metal to his aching head and heard the hammer of a gun clicking.

“Don’t move, dog.”

Derek set his jaw but remained still. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t heard before; the canine references were more unimaginative than demeaning nowadays. It was Chris he was worried about. He could hear Stiles whispering urgently to him, but still he wasn’t waking.

“You and your hunting buddy did something to our guys, didn’t you?” the woman holding the gun said darkly. “I know you did.”

“I didn’t kill them,” he gritted out, which was true enough. “They turned up where we were investigating a murder on the _Dew Creek_ crossroads. I woke up and they were dead. I buried them in the forest.”

The sickening splat of her spit hit him in the back of the neck and he curled his clawed fingers in the dirt in an attempt to hold his temper.

“Buried them like a dog with a bone, huh? Fucking animal,” she sneered, tossing her dark hair over her shoulder with distaste. “You think you’re untouchable because the biggest hunting families have forgotten what we stand for and sided with you Hales?” She pressed the gun harder into his temple. “_We_ haven’t forgotten. And now you and me, we’re going to make sure everyone else remembers.”

Movement registered in Derek’s peripheral vision and a thickset man came to stand beside the woman. “They were shot. You think a fuckin’ wolf even knows how to work a gun?”

The woman made a derisive noise. “So put a bullet in Argent too for good measure. Bigger message.”

Derek wasn’t sure what happened next exactly. All he knew was that his skin prickled wrongly and he sensed the tendons in the woman’s arms tighten, saw her fingers twitch around the trigger, even as he heard the man move toward the upturned car. He strained his hearing, but found everything in the forest around them had gone deafeningly silent.

Then, the man was wrenching Stiles out of the car through the window, heedless of the sharp cry of pain as he was dragged through the glass and warped metal. The man tossed him to the ground so Stiles sprawled out on his back beside Derek, who was still locked in place on his hands and knees. Their eyes met, just briefly.

“Derek,” Stiles breathed quickly.

The man roared with a nasty chuckle. “_Derek_ Hale? The alpha’s boy-pup, huh? Man, that’ll be a nice message alright. Mama’s gonna be mighty torn up when she digs up what’s left of you.”

“You a werewolf too, kid?” the woman asked, her voice devoid of emotion and Stiles lifted his chin.

“I wish.”

A snort of laughter sounded in her throat. “Well then, maybe if you tell me what Argent and Hale did to my brothers I won’t mess that pretty face up.” She drew another handgun from the holster at her waist and turned it on Stiles without so much as glancing away from Derek, where its twin was still directed.

“They didn’t do anything,” Stiles said blankly and Derek knew a moment of horror when he realised what Stiles was about to say, a mere split-second before the words tumbled from his lips. “It was me.”

The woman’s head snapped to him fast, disbelief and anger and loathing all over her face. She jerked, as if she’d found something lying there that wasn’t Stiles now that she’d looked, and her eyes widened. Her face went gaunt and frozen with fear as their eyes met.

Derek dared to lift his head and his brow twisted with a frown as he caught the way Stiles’s eyes flickered with that same, cat-like, moonstone gleam from before. His mouth was moving, though no sound came out. And yet the more it moved, the more the woman started to shake.

Derek watched a dark line of blood trickle out of Stiles’s nose, watched as the intensity of whatever power gripped the hunter, shook Stiles as it burned through him.

Derek felt it like a man standing on the perimeter of an earthquake, struggling to remain upright through the tremors as they watched the might of it conquer all in its path.

The man by the totalled _Camaro _started, evidently realising something was wrong. His gun jerked up, turned on Stiles. Derek took a leap of faith in the raw energy pulsing around them and dove, slamming hard into the male hunter and sending them reeling. The shot went wide, catching the woman in the chest and she hit the ground the same time as Derek and the man skidded across the floor.

The momentum carried them in a manic roll across the earth and scattered glass. Derek jerked back as the hunter lashed out but even superior speed didn’t save him from the shallow gash across his cheek, the burning explosion through his veins at the exposure to the aconite-laced blade. Derek rolled sideways, body going into shock almost on contact. He felt it send his limbs into jerking spasms, set his teeth against the acid burn through his veins.

What the fuck wolfsbane was this, that could immobilise him with a scratch?

All he knew was the man stood over him, breathing hard, face clouded with loathing and rage both. He had the gun in his hand again. Or was it another gun? Derek couldn’t focus enough to tell. His every muscle screamed, drawn tight to breaking point as he writhed against his will.

Through the blood pounding in his skull, he heard a wolf’s cry far in the distance, then another, then another.

_ Too far,_ he thought longingly._ Too far away._

“Go on, mongrel,” the hunter snapped, staring down the gun’s length at him. “Call for mama, huh? Tell her how much it hurts.”

Derek glared up at him through great huffing gasps for air and clenched teeth.

Howls sang through the night. Too far away.

Suddenly, Stiles collided into the hunter, hard enough to send the thickset man stumbling. He reeled around, gun arm raised and Stiles lunged for it. Long fingers snatched hold of his meaty wrist, the tendons starkly obvious as he strained in Stiles’s grasp. The sight of it came to Derek in snatches between the writhing pulses of his own agonised body.

Stiles’s face was fragile with a mix of fury and fear, not the complacent distance of a man possessed. Not the cool, detached, _instinctive_ actions of the _bies_. The forest around them didn’t call out in alarm. Stiles looked almost as afraid of the strength coursing through him in the split-second that the hunter’s free arm came up. It froze mid-motion, just as the man met Stiles’s gaze. Then the man jumped, as if he’d heard a loud noise, only for him in the darkness around them. Then he screamed.

It was a garbled, blood-curdling sound and he slammed his free hand to his head, tried to wrench out of Stiles’s grasp.

For just a heartbeat, Derek swore he saw the shadow of something almost shapeless around Stiles, almost. It was immense, with stag-like horns and the innateness of something born from the earth. And yet for Derek’s brief glimpse of its power through his tremours, it didn’t instil fear.

It felt safe. Protective.

Stiles’s eyes widened, his already faster heartbeat pounding with erratic panic as he watched. He shook the man’s hand again and Derek heard bones creak. The gun fell to the floor and only then did Stiles release him. He staggered back as the man dropped to the ground, where the hard, trained killer curled up in a ball and squeezed his ears between his hands as if to shield himself from the most deafening uproar.

Stiles dropped to his knees at Derek’s side, visibly shaken, blood streaming from his nose and his eyes dark with shock.

Wolves howled again in the distance, closer now. Derek felt warmth and relief flood him at their proximity. But at the same time, he wondered if whatever power coursed through Stiles had made the pack’s song sound like another, foreboding animal’s cry to the hunter on the floor. Abnormal cries that had morphed into the maddening echo of his sins as he’d fallen.

Derek’s fingers twitched, stretched out towards Stiles even as his body gave a spasm that was so painful he thought his neck might snap.

Stiles collapsed forwards onto his quivering hands, staring between Derek and the hunter and then Derek again, afraid and so painfully vulnerable in spite of all his power. His face went grey as he keeled over in the dirt, hitting it hard, but Derek saw through the darkening haze as long fingers reached for him, then twisted in his own, holding onto him like a lifeline.

Then his vision greyed out.

*

When he awoke, his body was sore but whole, his limbs fuzzy with abuse but completely his own again.

Slowly, he raised a hand and stared at his fingers, staring at them as everything came flooding back. His legs ached but they carried him from his childhood bed and out into the hall, because of course he was home, he’d registered it even as he dredged himself up from unconsciousness. He could smell the pack, hear the reassuring subtle hum of hushed voices far below.

The strain of wolfsbane that had sent him into uncontrollable spasms must’ve been designed to be painful, not deadly, he supposed.

He heard Chris’s healthy, if rough, voice mingled with the others as he made his way down the stairs, heard his parents and Peter and Laura and…

He stopped on the bottom stair as his sight caught up with the sounds and smells he’d been processing, his senses slowly regaining strength the more his body healed itself. From where he stood, one arm still resting on the balustrade, he could see through the open arch into the sitting room, where Stiles was sitting on one of the ‘L’ shaped sofas.

Sheriff Stilinski crouched in front of him, both hands gripping his son’s shoulders tightly, both of their eyes red, cheeks streaked with drying tears. Derek looked away quickly, loathe to trespass on such a private moment, but then he heard Stilinski whisper softly, “I’ve gotta speak to Talia about how we’re going to cover the crash up at the station, okay?”

The man Derek had only known for strength sounded so fragile, so regretful, relieved and longing all at once. Derek glanced back as Stiles gave a little nod, as Stilinski squeezed his shoulders a final time, before reluctantly turning and heading through the other door that lead into the kitchen.

Slowly, almost of their own volition, Derek’s feet carried him forward, until he found himself standing next to the sofa, watching the way Stiles’s fingers curled around his knees.

Never before had Derek so fervently wished he had Chris’s ability to know what voice to use for every situation, what words to use, what actions. He couldn’t explain the bone-deep yearning for it. All he could do was lick his dry lips slowly, and lower himself onto the sofa beside Stiles. If he was a little closer than the expansive furniture required, Stiles didn’t seem discomfited by his proximity.

One of the throw blankets Derek’s grandma had knitted was draped around Stiles’s shoulders, one of the corners of the multi-hued yarn caught between his fingertips.

“I’d guessed I would be able to do…stuff,” Stiles managed eventually, voice rough and quiet. “I mean, I knew whatever was inside me, whatever had taken me over hadn’t disappeared. But I didn’t think I’d be able to do…” His voice cracked a little, _“…that.”_

His heart was steady, but still faster than human’s, a constant, rolling rhythm that called to Derek like a favourite melody over the purr of the distant conversation in the other room.

“I can’t even feel it, not like before,” Stiles finished at last in a quiet, uncertain voice. They could research _biesy _but all the history in the world wouldn’t tell Stiles what he was. He’d have to discover it all like this, through experience.

Words came unbidden to Derek’s lips. “You can’t feel it in the way you’re thinking because it’s a natural part of you, like your lungs or your right arm. It’s not evil if you aren’t. And you’re not, Stiles. If you hadn’t been there, if you couldn’t do what you do, I’d be dead right now.”

Derek felt an anxious swell of tightness in his chest. He didn’t know what the right thing to say was. All he knew was that he cared about how his words would impact Stiles, wanted to do something to ease his pain, wanted to help him understand himself and the world he’d been thrown into. He wanted to show it to him.

“I saw something,” Derek offered into the quiet understanding between them. He let his calm, his utter acceptance and awe fill the room before he elaborated. “Just when your power crested. An aura, I think. It was incredible.” He licked his lips thoughtfully and the tiny motion drew Stiles’s gaze to his mouth, then his eyes.

“Stiles, nothing that felt the way _that_ did could be evil.”

It had felt like the trees surrounding his home, the way the birds greeted the sunrise. He hoped the way he looked and sounded right then could portray that because he didn’t know how to put any of it into words.

“There are good werewolves and bad werewolves, you know? Just like there are good humans and bad humans. Having the strength or opportunity to do bad doesn’t make every act you use them for evil, not if you make the right choices.”  


Stiles let out a quiet, shuddery breath and finally turned his head to look up at Derek from where he was hunched forward in on himself slightly. “I want to make the right choices,” he whispered and while he still sounded uncertain, he didn’t sound afraid.

Derek made a low noise in his throat that was almost relief. “You won’t always. God knows I don’t. But we can help you, if you want.”

The weight of Stiles’s gaze was still pleasantly heavy on Derek as his reply whispered into the warm sanctuary of the pack house, “I’d like that.”

They sat together in silence for a while. Derek canted his head slightly, listened to the conversation in the other room, but found himself oddly unconcerned about the cover-up. His thoughts were mostly occupied with how Stiles might fit in here while he found some confidence and trust in himself, what he might learn, and if, maybe, one day there might be a place for him in all of that. Just maybe.

“My dad is taking everything a little too well,” Stiles said wistfully. “I’m worried when the shock and relief of having me home in one piece wears off he’ll have a breakdown with the impact of it all.” He offered Derek a little quirk of his mouth that was all at once smaller yet more real, more beautiful than a full smile. “Stilinskis are good at compartmentalising.”

“It’ll hit you both when you feel safe enough to cope with everyone. It’s human nature,” Derek reasoned and that tiny smile twitched a little wider, a light touching Stiles’s honey-warm eyes.

“I guess we’ll have setbacks,” Stiles sighed. “It’s not probably not the healthiest way to cope but it looks like I’ll have a lot to learn about everything to keep my mind busy.”

“The only person who can tell you the healthiest way for you to recover from something is you,” Derek said firmly, finally earning himself a true smile from this complicated, incredible man.

Their gazes held, Stiles’s shining with bright hope and what Derek swore smelled like affection. Stiles made an abortive movement with his hand, hesitating before stretching his fingers out to intertwine with his, all without ever looking away.

Derek curled his fingers around his in response, finding solidarity and warmth and a little tingle there that he’d thought he was incapable of. His breath caught and Stiles’s fast heart stuttered as if he knew, gaze drinking in the tiniest flush to Derek’s cheeks.

It might’ve seemed disproportionate, the little flutter of excitement that rushed through him at just holding someone’s hand but it felt momentous after a lifetime of self-imposed solitude and Stiles, for his part, for his own reasons, seemed to feel the same.

Everything hung suspended in the fragile closeness between them, feelings and hope and need caught in a spider web of their combined intimacy issues and trauma. Some fresher than others.

“I want to help you,” Derek whispered into the space between them that had diminished considerably, so that he could feel Stiles’s breath on his cheek. Derek, who hadn’t ever let anyone close enough to make his heart skitter this way before and Stiles, who was just learning who he was all over again.

“Yeah,” Stiles breathed out in a low, husky rush, fingers squeezing Derek’s tight and god he was strong, as strong as Derek, maybe more but his grip was so gentle, his skin so soft. Those eyes, they _glowed _with supernatural want and human trepidation that Derek felt down to his bones. He leaned in, letting his eyes shutter closed as he pressed their foreheads together, breathing him deep.

“We’ve got time,” he promised quietly.

His mother, the alpha was in the other room, probably studiously _not _listening but she would be instrumental in Stiles’s recovery, in the way he learned about himself. There was a long road ahead of them, and who knew what lay between him and Stiles once the dust had settled. He could only hope, he supposed, and try his best with this startlingly new openness that Stiles incited him for no reason that many any sense.

He wouldn’t always be what was best for Stiles, wouldn’t always be the one to help him and he wouldn’t be able to ‘save’ him, but he could help Stiles to save himself. He could be there when the dust settled and see if this spark still flickered when the flames had burned out.

*

_Eighteen Months Later…_

Derek rolled the window to the _Camaro _down as he and Chris passed the border into Beacon Hills, relishing in the scent of home rushing through the car. After half a mile, the soft, welcoming bays of wolves echoed through the trees far beyond, some more toward town, some from home, acknowledging his return home the same way they always did.

He let a smile touch his lips, one that came easier and easier these days.

They didn’t really stay away for more than two nights or so lately, which suited them more, with Chris’s daughter moving to _Beacon Hills _to be with her boyfriend from college. And Derek, well, he felt anchored there now, rather than an impulse to flee.

His instincts prickled pleasurably the way the fur of a wolf might when brushed back and if Chris noticed him press the gas a bit more, he said nothing.

When they pulled up outside the house Chris now shared with his daughter, Allison bounded down the front steps, all dimples and pyjamas in the waning early evening light. Chris offered her a full, beaming grin, squeezing Derek’s shoulder as he grabbed his bags from the back.

“Home sweet home, huh?” He offered Derek a knowing, warm look, before shutting the car door behind him.

The sheriff’s house was actually on the corner of the same street. Derek noted that his cruiser was not in the drive and the lights were off when he drove by. Stilinski spent more time at the Hale house than not these days, with so much of _Stiles’s_ time occupied there.

Lately he’d been something of a home tutor for the kids, a surprisingly good one at that. It’d only started out as an exercise to bond him closer to the pack and assuage his hunger to know more about werewolves, about the supernatural world he’d found himself in. Along the way though, he’d carved a place for himself in that world as easily as if there had been space waiting for him already, even if he still had a long way to go. Even if his strength sometimes got the better of him or he found his mind drifting into dark, guilty places, about blood and trees and car wrecks that even his dad or Derek couldn’t draw him out of right away.

As Derek guided the _Camaro _down the dirt track toward the house, he heard the call of Cora and some of the other betas off in the distance and smiled, answered with a bay of his own but continued toward the house. He could smell Peter and Malia inside, likely adding the finishing touches to her ‘grown up attic room’ if the hint of paint was anything to go by. It was the figure on the steps that gripped his attention, however, even as he cut the engine and climbed out, pulling the duffel bag over his shoulder like some overeager kid greeting his high school sweetheart on his break from college.

“Hey,” Derek greeted breathlessly with an embarrassing, eager smile lighting up that single word.

Stiles hopped down the steps and dazzled Derek with one of his own smiles. It was the kind that made it hard to match him with the haunted creature that Derek had felt drive his fingers into his chest on the road that night.

Stiles fidgeted on the last step for a moment, his hair tousled and flecked with some paint that suggested he’d been helping upstairs. The sleeves of the familiar sweater clung to the lean muscles of his arms, thumbholes frayed and worn but looking so good around Stiles’s slender thumbs, that Derek’s smile lingered even longer at the corners of his mouth.

“You’ll wear extra thumbholes in that thing,” he said, far too pleased and Stiles smirked.

“If I keep it on long enough maybe I’ll end up with enough holes for all the fingers,” he mused, his ever-erratic heartbeat thudding wildly with delight as he practically bounced across the space between them. He crashed into Derek with such eager force that his bag went flying and they both went tumbling to the soft grass.

Stunned, winded laughter jerked out of them both and for a fleeting second, the world stood still as Stiles hovered over him. The pale evening silhouetted him in the not quite light, not quite dark, a perfect moment caught in the twilight with his eyes shining in spite of how far they both had yet to go.

Derek reached up, thumb caressing his cheek, fingers cupping the back of his neck as he brought him down for their lips to meet. This wasn’t the shy, uncertain kisses they’d stolen here and there, in the quiet moments alone after Hale family dinners or when they went out for coffee or when Derek brought Stiles dinner at the Stilinski house because the Sheriff unexpectedly had to work late. This was deep and searching, relief and hunger and safety all at once.

Stiles sank into him, groaning softly as his strong fingers sank into his hair, gripping tight, just a little bit too tight as he forgot himself in his eagerness.

A growl rumbled happily in Derek’s throat and his tongue flickered against Stiles’s. Their mouths melded together firmly, undeniably as the wildlife in the woods around them sang their goodnights.

When their lips parted, Stiles’s eyes were still dancing as they searched his face, a tiny frown touching his brow as he traced Derek’s kiss-bruised mouth with the touch of his fingers, already healing even as he watched.

“I like it,” Derek assured him, wrapping his own fingers around all of Stiles’s and holding them in place so he could kiss the tips as he held his gaze. “Don’t pull back from me now.”

Stiles hesitated, but the warmth in his eyes didn’t fade and he didn’t try to retreat back into himself as he’d done so many times before in the last eighteen months or so. He lay half-atop him still, sinking into his side a little more fully to absorb his warmth as always.

“You would say that,” Stiles said lightly, “the guy who found a monster out on the crossroads and offered him a blanket and some coffee.”

Derek snorted, wrapping his arms around Stiles and nuzzling into the hollow of his jaw before urging them both up onto the porch swing where his grandma’s knitted blanket lay, waiting during the daylight hours for anyone who happened by. He pulled it around Stiles, securing it with his arm around his shoulders and relishing in the way Stiles’s body warmed against him.

“You don’t still think of yourself that way, do you?” he asked after the half-full moon had risen higher into the sky, all trace of sunlight gone. The solar lights twinkled along the dirt track and into the trees. Derek could hear his family returning home from the charity fundraiser event at the school in the distance, all laughter and giggles and chatter in the miniature convoy as they made their slow way through the trees.

“I’ve learned a lot about the world while I’ve been here, with your family, with my dad, about this _Beacon Hills _I was so blind to before,” Stiles said wistfully. “I’ve learned a lot about me, bit by bit and if I let myself think about it sometimes, sometimes it gets too much, makes me feel…” He chewed the inside of mouth before looking at the place on the horizon where pink clung desperately to the darkening sky.

“It’s not all as clear as nigth and day, sometimes it’s in between. I am, I mean.” He winced. “Man, I’ve been spending too much time with the kids and their English homework but you know what I mean. I’ve done some shit, I _can _do so much worse and I’m not the same kid who used to hide out in the woods, trying to find dead bodies because of the ‘old folktales’ about the wolves that haunt it.”

He grinned at Derek mischievously as he recalled the ghost stories that had been spread around the town to keep nosy kids out of the preserve. “Being saved by a werewolf and a werewolf hunter who team up to stop the bad guys, that sort of makes you realise the world isn’t always black and white.”

Derek reached across him, pulling the blanket up higher around his neck, holding onto an edge as he stared into his eyes and brushed the edge along the underside of his jaw. “I didn’t save you,” he murmured gently. “It was you who saved us that night on the crossroads.”

Stiles tilted his head a little into the touch and leaned forward. Months of practically living in the Hale house and witnessing werewolf interaction drove him to press his cold nose to the warm hollow of Derek’s throat. “You didn’t save me,” he agreed, his words a quiet vibration against Derek’s skin, his neck that wasn’t offered to just anyone. “But you knew me. You believed in me and you waited for me to save myself which…that’s better sometimes, I think.”

In the warm quiet, Stiles couldn’t hear the approach of the Hales, nor the sound of Peter and Malia ordering the pizza inside, but even when they weren’t alone in a few moments, Derek knew he wouldn’t retreat away from him, wouldn’t pull away. They’d stay like this for a while, maybe until the pizza turned up or until the evening chill finally set in.

It felt good to be alone like this, but Stiles was this vibrant, social creature that integrated so well with the pack and drew Derek right back in with him, healing the fractures that had made Derek feel like a black sheep in his own family for so long before. They’d go back in and the warmth between them wouldn’t fade or disperse around his family, but spread like the steam from a warm bath or like the summer sun creeping over the horizon in the morning.

They’d helped each other save themselves, he supposed, even in ways neither of them knew they’d been broken before.

“You’re always so cold,” Derek chastised lightly as headlights flashed in the distance and he dipped his head to touch his warm nose to Stiles’s still chilly one.

Stiles grinned, this boyish, pure smile untouched by anything for just that moment and he stole a kiss before assuring him softly, “I don’t feel cold. Not anymore.”

_THE END_


End file.
